


other times and other places

by cuthbert



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Kuron is Shiro (Voltron)'s Clone, Other, Platonic Cuddling, Reading Aloud, Swearing, angst without an ending, bisexuality is confusing, in this house we call the comics canon, so much swearing, talking about feelings, though is it really platonic when there's a weird crush being dealt with?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-02-05 04:28:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12786969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuthbert/pseuds/cuthbert
Summary: "all realities are valid uwu"-Slav, probablyFragments of time. Or, other futures and other presents and other pasts for the Paladins and their people. Or, "where cuthbert dumps all the stuff she's written herself into a corner on".Tags will be added to as this is added to.





	1. Collapsing Stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now SIGNIFICANTLY not canon because of Season 6.

Keith’s missing still, and it’s been fifty-three hours and counting, nevermind the quintents or ticks. She hasn’t slept and Lance hasn’t slept and his voice cracks when he asks if there’s  _ anything he can do to help, Pidge _ and she just -

 

Pauses, then, because it sounded like he wanted to say something different, but she pauses and blinks and shakes her head and cracks the tension from her neck and finally says (because he’s fidgeting the way he does when a panic attack is soon in coming) “you could read me something” and brandishes her phone. 

 

He blinks, and pauses, but takes it and starts scrolling through the library. “You like poetry?”   
  


“I  _ live _ for poetry” she says and laughs a little bit, because it’s almost that X-Files line about Bach, but not. “Today I’m kinda feeling e.e. cummings.”   
  


“Sure,” he says, and scrolls further, past all of Atwood and down to Spicer (he quirks an eyebrow and she realizes with a weird salty-copper anxiety thrill that isn’t just her own that he’s seen certain old cartoons, too) to  Twentieth Century Poets, A Treasury , and he doesn’t mention that she’s weird to have kept their Eng-lit texts. He kicks off the floor, then, carefully, so he ends up floating horizontal and she has to kick off the console she was floating by a little bit to make herself level with him.

 

Micrograv is good for cuddling, and that’s exactly what they both need, though right now neither one of them is anything but macho-butch-prickly and not able to ask for it in words. She ends up resting her head against his belly while he reads, feeling the rise and fall as he breathes and speaks. “...nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands,” he finishes, and she doesn’t know how long it’s been, but there’s a part of her that doesn’t want that to matter and she doesn’t know how to feel about that. 

  
  
There’s been a weirdness between them in the past few weeks - the past sixteen months, honestly, if not the past three-ish years.    
  


He’s kind and he’s gentle with her without being patronizing, and only when she needs it and never anytime else.    
  


She’s always thought she liked girls, _only_ girls, always girls, that was just _there_ , but... he’s there, too. Or he has been. He's noodly in a weirdly elegant way, capable of being graceful and a klutz in the same breath’s span, and it isn't just that but he's starting to make her thing about things. Maybe it’s just femme people in general she likes. Allura’s honestly less careful about her makeup and skincare routine than Lance is about his, and views dressing up as a weapon of diplomatic warfare instead of a way of moving through the world as something to be admired and fought over -

 

And before she can figure out what it means that Lance is more femme than Allura and that the crush she had on one seems to have swerved towards the other, the console lights up and before the picture catches up with it she can hear Keith speaking.

 

He can hear Keith speaking, too, of course, and they both sort of flail back down towards the floor and she manages to grab the console just as he hits a tuneless “seventy-nine bottles of beer” and his voice cracks and he gives up and starts in again on “can anyone read - ”

  
  
“Yes! Yes, we read you, Black Lion, we hear you loud and clear,” she says, and behind her Lance makes a noise that’s half relieved sigh and half sob, and Keith makes an almost identical noise, only a little muffled behind the Blade of Marmora mask he’s got up. She’ll worry about why later, for now he’s home, and alive, and that’s more than perfect. 

 

“Welcome home, man, we missed you,” Lance says, voice thick with what’s got to be a regular hurricane of tears. 

 

She palms the switches to open the comm to the castle as a whole, not caring that they’ve got crew past the seven of them now, wanting everyone to hear that he’s  _ back _ and he’s - if he isn’t already he’s  _ going _ to be  _ safe _ and if she’s honest she wants Green and Red and Yellow and Blue to know Mother is home and her Paladin with her, too. Keith laughs, wildly - “How long was I gone? You sound like - did you even sleep?!”   


  
She laughs, too, then, and it seems whatever face weather Lance is having has spread because there are tears that come loose with it. “Nope. Maybe Hunk did but I think he just kept making layers of cake.” She scrubs at her face and it doesn’t seem to do anything at all. Lance drifts over and puts his arms around her shoulders and there’s a warmness in her that has nothing to do with physical contact in a big cold room. She doesn’t want to be thinking about that right now.   
  


“Guess you gotta find someone to marry, man, he’ll be disappointed if Cake Orthanc goes to waste,” Lance drawls, and she can tell he’s grinning and then the way Keith laughs has a weird strangled tone to it and he’s got to be crying. Lord of the Rings was always his thing, wasn’t it? Trust Lance to remember that, with Hunk elsewhere and distracting himself.   
  


She realizes with a jolt that she doesn’t want him to let go of her, and so with a suddenness that makes him twitch a little bit she reaches up and grabs his forearms. “Let’s  _ all  _ get married. Tell Matt I’ve got a harem or something, later, we can have a cake fight and take pictures and he’ll  _ totally _ fall for it.”

  
She only remembers she’d thrown the comms open Castle-wide when Olia cuts in with a gleeful yelp of “I’ll officiate!”


	2. and no feeling that's worth having/would call my heart its home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another time, another place. What if "Shiro" wasn't Shiro? And what if two of the Paladins realized it pretty much simultaneously? Why did I put a Mountain Goats song on repeat and try to write?
> 
> (Name switching in the first part of this is intentional; Katie is vulnerable where Pidge compartmentalizes things.)

It had been a weird few days, filled with the kind of psychic bullshit that had her _certain_ that Jacques Vallee was sitting on Gordon White’s veranda in afterlife-Australia drinking cocktails, and the two of them were laughing like suburbanite moms watching a sitcom. That the lions had seemingly taken Coran explaining things to do with their origins as a starting-gun to start dumping information was just an extra layer of crazy-making on the pressure-cooker… and that metaphor had really, really gone someplace Katie wasn’t expecting.

_“She said she did_ what _to the cat?”_

_“Used quintessence to cure him somehow, you heard me the first time.” It wasn’t like Alfor to look defeated. It wasn’t like any Altean to fold inwards like that, body and energy both pulled in like they were guarding a wound. “Of course I’ve read her papers, of course I’ve kept abreast of her research, but I thought ‘Effects on Life-Forms” was purely theoretical… I’ve been a damned_ idiot _, Trigel, and in doing it I may have just let Honerva damn herself.”_

Katie caught herself at the door to her room, uncertain when she’d walked the length of the corridor or started to head in. Other people’s memories would stop being so loud if she just had a chance to rest and make her own louder, surely. Maybe she did need to just sleep for about 40 - she paused, caught herself, and stubbornly thought _hours_.

Naturally that moment, the moment when she finally made eye contact with her bed and finally realized that she hadn’t slept in almost twice that many hours, was the same moment a tiny squeaking came from the corridor behind her. To his credit, Plachu at least looked a little bit sheepish when she slowly pivoted and blinked blearily down at him. “Can I help you with something?”

The mouse nodded, and it was with a sort of fatalistic humor that Pidge recalled playing Cinderella as a little kid, with her brother squeaking and gesturing as a mouse. If she let herself start giggling over the memory she’d never stop. Plachu cocked his head to one side, letting slip a tiny querying squeak, and Pidge shook her head. “Sorry. I haven’t slept in a while, it’s getting to me.” The mouse nodded again, and pointed back down the corridor, dashing a few steps ahead and pausing. Plainly she was meant to follow him. “Can I at least change clothes first, please?”

  
\---

 

“Did you guys _seriously_ pull me out here because I’m the only girl who’s not Allura?”  
  
It was Pidge. Katie, really, but she hadn’t said she wanted anyone calling her that. Dangerous to keep remembering she had another name. He didn’t want to screw up and throw her off in the middle of a fight. Still, better her than Lance, at least. Definitely better her than Allura. It had taken years-old controlled effort not to jump when he heard her whispering, and having managed that, Keith stayed curled up.

Furious whispers and tiny paws audibly tapping away at a touchscreen continued for a few moments more, and then there was a “Fine” less whispered than grumbled and he had company. Tiny clawed hands and feet ran up Keith’s arms, the mice settling in on him as he’d seen them do for Allura. Whoever had decided to shimmy up his hair and settle nestled in it gently patted him on the crown of the head.

“Hey,” Pidge said, her voice sounding downright rough in a normal speaking range. Very cautiously, mindful of the mice, Keith shifted so he could at least look sidelong at her. “Whoa, you look like I feel.”

Given that she was visibly maybe three minutes out of a sleep-deprived crying jag and wearing (borrowed? stolen?) _salvaged_ Altean robes that didn’t quite fit, Keith didn’t feel like it was a fair comparison. “Why are you here?” he asked, too tired to make it sound as threatening as the bits of him that had never stopped being angry and afraid wanted.

“I’ve been… okay you know I basically have Batman files on you guys so I don’t need to tell you that part, but…” She trailed off, and nodded at the mice. “They don’t have my files and they still noticed something was up, and Plachu thought maybe you did too and that was why you’d gone all weird.”

There was a watery quality to her voice, like what she was dancing around saying was enough to bring her to tears. “You want me to go first, or can you say it?” His voice cracked, and he grimaced. He’d kept his face pressed to his knees when he couldn’t hold the tears back, earlier. Hopefully that didn’t show on his face.

She’d been sitting cross-legged, facing him from the side, and abruptly she shifted, pulling her legs up and clenching her hands together to hold them against her chest. “I… I know that… _fuck_ ,” she said, bowing her head. “You aren't the only one the mice are watching. I know Black responded and I know we all _want_ it to be him but _that isn’t Shiro upstairs_.”

Keith jerked his head sideways, pressing his forehead to his knees and wishing he could just _vanish_ . Tiny little hands yanked none too gently at his hair in a scolding way, and he mumbled an apology.  
  
“It is him but it isn’t him. I don’t know if they can make clones or if he’s a bio-android or _what_ ,” she continued, voice shaking. “That isn’t our Shiro. I found a reason to mess around with his arm - and come on, when the hell has Shiro ever let me do that on a whim? - and _nothing I changed is in there_. Like, the code is back to default, or as close to default as Ulaz had it when he broke him out. The energy flow is different, too, there’s not… it’s like this is the stock model and he had a - ”

“ _Stop it!_ ” Keith snarled, far more harshly than he meant. There was a bit of a growl he’d thought long since suppressed present in his voice, and he carefully looked up, unfolding and turning to look at Pidge with no effort to mask the level of horrified shame that surged through him as had the anger of a moment before. She was sitting cross-legged again, hands clenched on her knees, but she hadn’t moved even when he snapped. Her jaw was set with the same tension as her hands, her lower lip trembling visibly even as she tried to hide it. He’d caused that. Yet she hadn’t jumped back, or left.

“I’m sorry. I ramble when I’m scared, you’ve seen me like… staring at a squad of drones and… and if I don’t stop myself I’m going to keep doing this. I didn’t _mean_ to make it sound like I didn’t care about anything but the programming in his arm, I just - ”

“No, _I’m_ sorry,” he said, cutting her off. “I’m not… I’m _really_ not cut out for this.” Two of the mice jumped ship and scurried over to fuss over Pidge, but whoever had settled on his head and right shoulder hadn’t shifted. An indignant squeak followed what he’d said. “I don’t know what that meant, but I’m calling bullshit.”  
  
Somehow there was a shaky and tentative laugh at that, across from him. “ _This_ being… being leader?”

“Yeah,” Keith said, surprised by how easily it fell from him. It felt like a weight lifting to admit it out loud. “I don’t know what else to do, but I’m not… I’m not like Shiro…” He didn’t want to say “was", so he just stopped speaking.

Pidge nodded, solemnly. “So what do we do?” she asked. “I mean yeah I heard what you just said, I just - do we tell Hunk first? He'll cry, but maybe we’ll get lucky and it’s as obvious as me being a girl was. Apparently.”

  
"You being a girl wasn't something like this."  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this just sort of fizzles out. Like I said in the work summary, this is where I'm putting the VLD stuff that I hit a wall on. 
> 
> Jacques Vallee theorized that UFO phenomena and fairy/fae phenomena were coming from the same source (if you can find it, Passport to Magonia is an experience of a book; if not, his journals from the sixties through seventies are 1.published and 2. a trip). Gordon White is a frankly brilliant sorcerer with an excellent podcast, often talking about similar things (Rune Soup - it's also the title of his blog). I'll probably end up referring to his work pretty frequently in works in this fandom; his corollary to Clarke's Third Law fits Altean tech pretty neatly, and I feel like Keith's probably got a battered paperback copy of Star.Ships somewhere in his shack. 
> 
> I have an entire rant about how we have occult authors right now whose work would be the Waite and Crowley of ~120 years in the future, but I'll cut myself off.


	3. Doubt Thou The Stars

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In some reality, the one who's half-Galra is not a boy. Only a few things are different.

I.

She is seven years old and Daddy is still there and has been teaching her to shoot, _finally_ . It’s after they’ve collected all the cans and they’re walking back to the trailer that she asks him something that’s been bothering her.  
  
“Why’d you pick my name?”  
  
“Your mother picked your name,” he answers, stopping and switching the bag of totally-kilt-dead aluminum to his other hand so he can stoop and pick her up. “Kithara’s a name where she’s from, too. She said ‘it’s a tree from a dead planet’, said our willows looked kind of like ‘em.”  
  
She wrinkles her nose. “So I _could_ a been _Willow_ but you picked somethin’ from outer _space_?”

He laughs, and kisses her on the cheek. “It’s a word here, too. Greek for guitar, or an ancient kind of harp. I thought it was pretty.”

The next year, same time, he leaves and doesn’t come back. She’s uprooted then, for the first time, and it takes a long time to remember that conversation without it hurting.

 

II.

“Co-gain, Kit-haira?”

“Kogane, Kith _ar_ a.”

\---

  
“...transfer student, Kogane _Ki_ thara.”

“Ki _-tha-_ ra.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing.”

 ---

“...new student, Kither-uh Koganney….”

“Ki-tha-ra Ko-ga-ne.”

“...who is evidently sensitive to mispronunciation of her name, so be kind, children.”

(They weren’t, of course.)

 ---

 “Kogane, K’tara?”

“If you can’t get it right just call me _Keith_ , okay?!” It spilled out of her before she even looked up, and when she did she knew she went pale. It wasn’t some random instructor who’d come to find her.

That Commander Iverson, a legend in his own right, though one she was yet to learn in full - that he, of all people, laughed - that said enough about her test scores. She hadn’t expected him to come and offer the acceptance personally, that much was for sure. “All right, Keith it is, then, when it’s not Cadet. I’ll have them note that in your file.”

She didn’t know how to reply except to nod, and to choke out “thank you” past the fear that this wasn’t at all what it seemed. She had a place to be, a role to play, and a new name to live up to. It was a lot.  
  
It was easier to live up to a tomboy’s nickname when you looked the part, so that night she cut off most of her hair. The uniform regulations only stipulated that it not be dyed “unnatural colors”, a hack job haircut done over a bathroom sink (a sink she almost threw up into twice from the sheer unbridled terror that somehow the Garrison wouldn’t really take her in and she’d have to go back to “family”) didn’t break any rules.

 

III.

There were two things that ran through Keith’s head when she first saw Misato Shirogane:

  * __Wonder Woman! -__



and

  * __I want her to_ like _me_. _



   
These were, she’d learn, common reactions. Shiro (she preferred a nickname too, she dressed in the “male” uniform too, she had her hair buzzed short on the sides and in back and nobody said anything to her about it, _too_ ) laughed it off. She’d do anything to help anybody, so awestruck underclassmen were nothing new at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know why I stalled out on this one, tbh. I am firmly on Team Lesbians Improve Every Story, but somehow... well, anyway, this is what it is, I stalled out where it stops.


	4. more different than alike

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So - apparently last August I considered the possibility of Pidge ending up with access to Honerva's archives. 
> 
> Things went south fast.
> 
> This was less written than it just kind of happened on the page.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, with S6 out, to say nothing of 4 and 5, this has been well and thoroughly jossed to heck.
> 
> Still think I need to throw it in here.

 

 

“I mean, she was a brilliant woman who just wanted to know more, and more, and more, and she used a force nobody really could understand then to save her _cat_. I have access to her notes, most of her published research… and I have a lot more at stake than a pet’s life, you know?”

Keith nodded without saying anything, still looking like he had no idea why she’d pulled him aside. Katie sighed, and pulled her glasses from her face to rub at her eyes again. “If I go the way Ha - the way _Honerva_ did, someone’s got to put me down. And I can’t ask Hunk ‘cause he’ll just start crying and not answer, and Lance will either do the same thing or just go all brittle and fake happy and tell me he’ll do it and then _freeze_ when he finally has to. I’m kind of afraid to ask Allura because she’ll either say yes way too easy or just _look_ at me and I don’t know which is worse, and Shiro… isn’t even an option, and neither’s Lotor, and Coran would just _break_ , but you....”

She was struggling to put it into words, that he knew what the stakes were, that he had flown where Alfor and Zarkon had and probably had the next clearest impression of just what it’d look like if she _did_ end up… tainted, for lack of a better word, that he’d never broken a promise that she knew of, and then suddenly his arms were around her and his face was buried against her hair and he was _trembling_. “Fuck that,” he said, voice strained to the point of being almost reedy. “I won’t need to because none of us are ever letting you fall that far. We’re going to find your brother, we’re going to find your dad, and you _aren’t going to go crazy_.”

The only hand she had free was the one holding her glasses, the other was pressed up against her chest between the two of them. It made reaching up and patting his shoulder very, very awkward, but there was nothing else she knew to _do_. She’d crossed a line, that much was obvious, and she didn’t know how to drag him back over it and away from the same abyss she was afraid of falling into. “You mean that?” she asked, surprised by how fragile her sounded with his chest muffling it.

“Yeah. We already lost Shiro. I’m not losing anybody else.”

She froze mid-awkward-pat. “It’s not just me, then. That’s - that’s not - “

Keith shook his head and she really hoped he wasn’t actually _crying_ , because that would’ve just smeared tears and snot all through her hair. “No. It’s not him. I wish I knew what that guy upstairs was, but he’s not… he looks like him and he sounds like he used to, at the Garrison, but he’s not _him._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know why ch. 1's end notes are stuck to everything argh

**Author's Note:**

> If Matt's band of weirdos doesn't at some point make the Castle-ship their home, too, I will be Very Sad.


End file.
